Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/505

483 ATERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 483 receiving succour. The careful reader of Thucydides will never be disturbed by any violent break in the history : and the event which considered as one, was the most momentous in the whole war, and which the author has invested with the most lively interest, — namely, the Athenian expedition to Sicily, with its happy commencement and ruinous termination, — is told with but few (and those short) digressions.* The whole work, if it had been completed, would resolve itself into three nearly equal divisions : I. The war up to the peace of Nicias, which from the forays of the Spartans under Archidanius is called the Archi- damian war ; II. The restless movements among the Greek states after the peace of Nicias, and the commencement of the Sicilian expedition • III. The renewed war with the Peloponnesus, called by the ancients the Decelean war, down to the fall of Athens. According to the division into books, which, though not made by Thucydides, proceeded from an arrangement by some intelligent grammarians, the first third is made up of books II. III. IV. ; the second of books V. VI. VII. ; of the third, Thucydides himself has completed only one book, the VHIth. § 4. In discussing the manner in which Thucydides distributed and arranged his materials, we have still to speak of the 1st book ; indeed this demands a more particular consideration, because its arrangement depends less upon the subject itself than upon Thucydides' peculiar reflections. The author begins with asserting that the Peloponr.csian war was the greatest event that had happened within the memory of man, and establishes this by a retrospective survey of the more ancient history of Greece, including the Persian war. He goes through the oldest period, the traditions of the Trojan war, the centuries immediately following that event, and, finally, the Persian invasion, and shows that all previous undertakings wanted the external resources which were brought into play during the Peloponucsian war, because they were deficient in two things, — money and a navy,f — which did not arise among the Greeks till a late period, and developed themselves only by slow^ degrees. In this way Thucydides applies historically the maxims which Pericles had practically impressed upon the Athenians, that money and ships, not territory and population, ought to be made the basis of their power ; and the Peloponnesian war itself appeared to him a great proof of this position, because the Peloponnesians, notwith- standing their superiority in extent of country and in the number of their free citizens, so long fought with Athens at a disadvantage till their alliance with Persia had furnished them with abundant pecuniary re- sources, and thus enabled them to collect and maintain a considerable Sicilian expedition; e. g., the calamities produced ut Athens by the occupation of Decelea, and the horrible massacre at Alycalessus by the Thraci&n mercenaries (Thucyd. Til. 27 — oO) f x^H-* 701 Ka ' w*™* o T o
 * How happily even these ciij is are interwoven with the narrative of the